The supersession of the old by the new Dispensation is, at all events, an historical fact; and if our explanation of that fact is satisfactory in the historical, it cannot be unsatisfactory in the religious, order; because all truth, which is only the ascertained order of the world, or sequence and relation of things and of events, is coherent and beneficent. The following are the particulars of the fact, and all of them appear to be sufficiently intelligible:—The law of the old Dispensation had been regarded as given and executed by God. Under the mental conditions of the times, it could not have been regarded otherwise; and that view of it was true in a general and absolute sense, because everything in the universe and on this earth is a link in the order of things, which is aboriginal and external to man. The existence of the material universe itself, of this world of ours, of all natural phenomena, of man, of the order of society, and, therefore, of law, and of the execution of law, are all, in this sense, from God. It was true also in a relative and particular sense, because the human mind was then, and especially was it so throughout the East, in that state in which no conception has as yet been formed either of the existence and action of general laws in nature and in human society, or of the spontaneity and freedom, within certain limits, of human action. Everything, therefore, is unavoidably and honestly referred to God, and in an especial degree the giving and execution of the law. And so did it continue in after times, so long as the Dispensation stood, with respect to everything that was said or done on its behalf, or that in any way bore upon it. Every word that every prophet uttered in exposition, enlargement, or support of it, was regarded by the congregation, and, too, by the prophet himself, as coming from God; and every event also that occurred in connexion with it was brought about by God. At that epoch—we have in our hands the evidence for the period of the Homeric poems—it was so in Greece. And, doubtless, it was so then in Italy and all over Europe. Such ideas belong to a certain stage in mental progress, the stage in which the world was then. This was the natural philosophy, this was the metaphysics of those times.